“Liberals are offended by this video of a Keurig being thrown off of a building. Please retweet to offend a liberal.”

That tweet, which was posted with a video of a Keurig Green Mountain coffee maker being dropped from the second story of an apartment building, was one of many sent over the weekend with the hashtag #boycottkeurig.

By Sunday night, it was a trending topic on Twitter.

Why call for a boycott of Keurig? And why would liberals be offended by the sight of an environmentally problematic, pod-based coffee maker meeting an untimely doom?

The story begins, as you might have expected, with Sean Hannity.

On Thursday, the Fox News host spoke about the allegations against Roy Moore, the Alabama senate candidate who, The Washington Post had reported that day, made sexual advances toward teenage girls when he was in his early 30s, including a 14-year-old.

Mr. Hannity, describing those actions on his radio show while speaking with a co-host, Lynda McLaughlin, seemed to justify Mr. Moore’s reported conduct by calling one of the encounters “consensual.”

Later, on his television show, Mr. Hannity said that the statement “was absolutely wrong” and that he “misspoke.” He then brought up the possibility of accusers lying for money, or for political purposes.

On Friday, Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, the partisan watchdog organization that has campaigned against Mr. Hannity since at least May, began to criticize advertisers for sponsoring his show in light of his comments about Mr. Moore.

Keurig responded to Mr. Carusone, and said that it had stopped an ad from airing during Mr. Hannity’s show. It was one of five companies to indicate that it would pull advertising, including Realtor.com and the vitamin company Nature’s Bounty.

It was the second time this year that Mr. Hannity has faced the threat of an advertiser exodus of the type that helped cement Bill O’Reilly’s exit from Fox News. But this time, Mr. Hannity’s online supporters fought back in numbers against the advertisers — even, in some cases, destroying their coffee makers.

Keurig did not immediately respond to a question about whether it would reconsider advertising on the program. But in an email to employees, the company’s chief executive, Bob Gamgort, said that its acknowledgment that it had pulled the ad was not standard practice and constituted “an unacceptable situation.”

The email, which was obtained by The Washington Post and confirmed as valid by a company spokeswoman, Katie Gilroy, said that the tweet “gave the appearance of ‘taking sides’ in an emotionally charged debate that escalated on Twitter and beyond over the weekend, which was not our intent.”

“Our company and brand reputations are too valuable to be put at risk in this manner,” it said.

It was difficult to measure the scale of the anti-Keurig counterprotest; even when a topic begins to trend, the tweets are often spread and amplified by bots and other politically motivated accounts. But the calls for a boycott underscored the difficulties American companies face in a hyperpartisan era where any sort of political stance can set off online protests.

Mr. Hannity responded to the videos gleefully on Sunday, calling them “hilarious.” On Sunday evening, he pledged to give away hundreds of coffee makers. (He did not specify the brand.)

On Monday, though, Mr. Hannity said he had accepted Mr. Gamgort’s apology and urged his supporters to stop smashing their machines.

“In my opinion, Keurig was a victim of a group that has a radical agenda, and they didn’t know,” he told listeners, adding that he had five Keurig machines himself.

While some on the left dutifully took up arms, tweeting in support of Keurig, others just seemed bemused (or amused).

“Sorry, I was off Twitter for a while,” wrote the author Geraldine DeRuiter. “It appears that people are destroying coffee machines to show their support of child molesters?”

It's one thing to swear not to buy anything from a company you're boycotting. And, quite another to be stupid enough to destroy something you've spent well over $100 on to prove some idiotic point.
This speaks to the brilliance and intellectual level of the people who are still supporting a pedophile for Senator.
And, I'm fairly certainly these are the SAME people who jeer at inner city rioters for 'destroying their own neighborhoods.'
So, they're stupid AND hypocritical.
Dangerous combination in voters.

Murdoch is the source of the problem. He has offered twice to buy CNN and was rebuffed. That is why Don the Con is holding up the Time Warner merger. The Con wants CNN in Murdoch’s hands so he can use the network as a bookend to FOX as his personal propaganda arm. Murdoch needs to retire and let his sons take over.

So will the tristanrobin household! In fact, we have two - one just for use every day, which only makes one cup - and a larger one for when we have guests that has a four cup water reserve so we can make a lot more coffee faster and serve everybody at once.

I just can't imagine buying something and then destroying to make an anonymous pointless point!

to always have a fresh cup of coffee instead of a half pot of stale coffee on the burner?

nope. not me.

I find it cheaper - I only make the coffee I want to drink - and don't throw any away. And in my Braun drip coffee maker, you had to make at least 8 cups or it didn't taste right - the ratio of coffee to water was always off. YOu couldn't make one cup only of a drinkable cup of coffee.